The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

7 In No-Man’s-Land

8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”

9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub

10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)

11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)

12 Let’s Rusticate Again

13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)

14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress

15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)

16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

17 Then There Were Three Again

18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)

19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)

20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”

21 A Giant in the Promised Land

22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter

Part Four

1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)

2 The Return of Abu Hasan

3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir

4 The Veil

5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name

6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker

7 “I Know Who You Are!”

8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue (#u7ed8f596-2d8b-5a88-a3c0-7e9cc48a785d)

A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism (#u7ed8f596-2d8b-5a88-a3c0-7e9cc48a785d)

A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.

—J. M. Barrie

2009. Northern England

I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said that he would not live for much more than a week.

Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-gray inland port in Yorkshire not far from England’s east coast. More than one hundred years earlier, Count Dracula might well have grimaced as he passed through, en route from Whitby to Carfax Abbey. Most foreigners (and some southerners) think it is spelled Ghoul, especially after their first, and invariably only, visit. This is where Ernest’s final days were to be spent, though at least the hospital sat at the very edge of town and his window faced the more pleasant countryside.

It had been a rapid decline for a man who, well into his nineties, on the eleventh day of the previous November, had walked the three and three-quarter miles to the train station before daybreak. He had traveled south on three trains of varying decrepitude and two rickety tubes to stand by the Cenotaph on Whitehall with thousands of others. Many were bemedaled, some wheelchaired, but each had a shared something behind the eyes and a similar thought focused just above the horizon, as the high bells of St. Stephen’s in Westminster struck eleven and the nation fell silent. Then, with only tea accompanied by Bovriled and buttered crumpets from the Wolseley on Piccadilly as fuel, he had made the return trip the same day, pushing open, with untroubled lungs, his unlatched door way past the time that saw most decent folks in bed. He had told me that it was the only day he could ever remember when he had not conversed with a single person. He had had his reasons.

Now he tugged at a length of clear plastic tubing, which disappeared under sterile white tape and into the wattle of his forearm; an artificial tributary into the slowing yet still magnificent deep red tide within. He did not appear to be uncomfortable. On the contrary, he exhibited a strong and urgent desire to speak.

He gestured toward the clock above his bed with his right hand. “In the story I am about to tell, please bear in mind the possible minor defects and chronological leaps in the memory of a dying man or two. Exaggeration is naturally occurring in the DNA of the cadaver known as the tale. This is important.” He looked straight at me in the way that he always had, in order to let me know that this part of the game was not to be taken lightly.

I do not paraphrase, for my grandfather spoke this way from as far back as I can recall. His deliberate and florid verbals had always transformed the planning, execution, and completion of what for a young lad might otherwise have been everyday chores, into marvelous adventures of joyous nonsense. He turned tuneless whistles into lush arias effortlessly.

He had been my mentor and teacher, instructing me on how to hold a fish knife, stun a billiard ball. He taught me the subtleties and implications of en passant on the chessboard. He knew whether to introduce the team to the Queen or the Queen to the team. He taught me that the correct answer to “How do you do?” is indeed “How do you do?” Of his early life, I vaguely recall references to his days as an emetic, vicious, ear-tugging martinet of a schoolmaster; his inherited connections to and shares in the Cunard shipping line, gained through an ancestor’s good fortune in a Cape Town card game over ever-cheapening rum with bothersome (but luckily pie-eyed and wobbly) pirates; his junior partnership with Sir Thomas Beecham,

England’s greatest-ever conductor and founder of both the Royal and the London Philharmonic orchestras; dinners with royalty, with Niven and Korda, Gielgud and Fonteyn, Olivier and Churchill. I remember framed monochrome photographs of him at that time, as a young man in a Savile Row tuxedo, Jermyn Street cuff links, well-heeled Bond Street shoes, a heavily starched shirt, and a head of black hair expertly topped off with a light Brylcreem.

This did not seem to me to be the same person who, from the boundary rope on summer afternoons of my boyhood, taught me the lengthy names of Welsh railway stations, chuckled at cricketers being struck in the groin or on the backside, and joyously read to me Kipling, Barrie, and The Captain Erasmus Adventurer’s Book for Boys, Daredevils and Young Kings. And he was far from the man who lay before me now, though from the neck up, at least, he appeared unchanged—his matinee idol’s widow’s peak proudly silver, his eyes active and mischievous. The sunken contours of the bedsheets, however, suggested that much of the man I had known all my life was already gone.

I suspected that it was right to remain silent. I thought it misplaced to counter his statement about dying men, for we knew each other too well. He would indeed die, in this bed constructed for such purposes. He would soon be not breathing. And cold. I knew I must simply listen.

I had always loved my grandfather’s stories. At first, I believed them absolutely. Later, I tried to distinguish between truth and fairy tale. I often got this wrong. Of course, I had been spoon-fed cynicism from an early age by Ernest’s wife, Betty, my dear late grandmother, who had told me repeatedly, “Lad! Never believe anything of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

But of all the stories he ever told me, not one compared to the one he now told me in the last hours of his life. I believed him then. I still believe him.

* * *

It was during a stint as the mayor of Goole that Ernest, a very sprightly eighty-eight, spent two weeks in the hills outside Sarajevo in the sublimely warm and cloudless April of 2003, attempting to find a twin town for his parish. Sarajevo had been chosen for personal reasons; Ernest had recently read his father’s wartime diaries, in which the old city had featured heavily and whose characters had enthralled him.

Very early one Friday morning, Ernest stumbled across a shack in a village destroyed by war, a hermitage surrounded by a sea of flowers, a prism of blues, azures, cobalts, teals, and beryls. Of lilacs and violets.

Ernest recalled with absolute clarity the fine sapphire haze through which he walked. Peeking through a grubby, splintered pane, he saw a small, square room, with unsure blue light leaking in from another window on the opposite wall. An old man was moving slowly within, declaiming loudly enough for Ernest to hear from outside.